An intraoperative diagnosis of parotid gland tumors using Raman spectroscopy and support vector machine

Abstract

The preoperative and intraoperative diagnosis of parotid gland tumors is difficult, but is important for their surgical management. In order to explore an intraoperative diagnostic method, Raman spectroscopy is applied to detect the normal parotid gland and tumors, including pleomorphic adenoma, Warthin's tumor and mucoepidermoid carcinoma. In the 600–1800 cm−1 region of the Raman shift, there are numerous spectral differences between the parotid gland and tumors. Compared with Raman spectra of the normal parotid gland, the Raman spectra of parotid tumors show an increase of the peaks assigned to nucleic acids and proteins, but a decrease of the peaks related to lipids. Spectral differences also exist between the spectra of parotid tumors. Based on these differences, a remarkable classification and diagnosis of the parotid gland and tumors are carried out by support vector machine (SVM), with high accuracy (96.7~100%), sensitivity (93.3~100%) and specificity (96.7~100%). Raman spectroscopy combined with SVM has a great potential to aid the intraoperative diagnosis of parotid tumors and could provide an accurate and rapid diagnostic approach.